I didn’t believe it either. Robotic sperm. Firstly how? And then of course why?
But reading this article on the BBC science pages further revealed a few things. Firstly that it’s not a robot for fertilising, instead it’s to deliver nano-packages, a drug to a very specific part of the body via the bloodstream for instance. Secondly that it combines a wide array of state of the art technologies that have only recently arrived at the same point of time to make this possible.
And finally that this is yet another example (such as this 3D printed shark skin above) where scientists are taking their design guidelines from nature; a challenging battleground where only the best prototypes prevail. Perhaps then the future of robotics in our daily lives will be far more familiar than we ever expected, simply digitised copies of the real things.